Biography
of HENRYK GORECKI featured in "STRINGS ATTACHED"
Saturday, January 29, 2005 at 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, January 30, 2005 at 3:00 p.m.
Kaul Auditorium, Reed College
"I was born in Silesia. . . Old, ancient Polish land. But three cultures have always coexisted there: Polish, Czech, German. . . Why do I like Czech music? Where does my knowledge and liking of German and Austrian music come from? Why do I worship Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Bach? Why am I enamored with Szymanowski and Chopin? Why did I grow up with them? Because at the beginning of my musical education, when I had no idea about music--nothing!--these names were always near me: Beethoven, Chopin, Szymanowski. . . Does one need to consider it in a special way, does one need to think much about this? I do not think so. . . Nobody chooses their time and place of birth." -- Henryk Mikolaj Górecki (Zakopane, Poland, 18 July 1997)
Born on 6 December 1933, Górecki studied composition with Boleslaw Szabelski at the State Higher School of Music (PWSM) in Katowice (1955-1960). After a post-graduate sojourn in Paris, he became a professor of composition at the PWSM in Katowice, and-- in 1975-1979--its Rector. As a composer, he has been known and respected in Poland, but not well-known around the world. The phenomenal success of his Symphony no. 3 (Gramophone's "Best-selling CD in 1993") has astounded many of his contemporaries, especially in Poland where the work had been known for more than a decade. In his home country Górecki's Third was perceived as one of a series of fascinating compositions, the result of a long and complex creative evolution.
Górecki has worked with great determination to develop his own compositional voice, through assimilating the techniques of his predecessors (Bartók, Szymanowski) and those active around him (Boulez, Xenakis, Nono), and then paring away all elements extraneous to his personal expression. These processes were carried out through the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with the Four Preludes for piano from 1955, his first numbered opus, and reaching full maturity with Old Polish Music from 1969. This is the most radical and dissonant period in his output: in the 1960s, Górecki belonged to the small group of the most avant-garde composers of his time. Together with Penderecki, Serocki, and others he established a pattern for new music: the more dissonance the better, the harsher the sounds, the better. This style of writing, associated with the so-called "Polish school of the 1960s" is alternatively known as "sound mass composition" or "sonoristic composition" - a name taken from "sonorous" or "sounding." In order to reduce music to pure sound, these composers stripped away all elements, e except tone color. This path to the essentials is encapsulated by Górecki's Genesis cycle (1962-1963) and the aggressive Scontri for large symphony orchestra (1960) -- a work filled with clashes of vertical and horizontal sound patterns, often organized serially.
During the 1970s, Górecki worked to achieve a direct link between the emotional and spiritual content of texts, both sacred and traditional, and his musical architecture. He sought inspiration in early Polish music: a 13th-century conductus, a 16th-century polyphonic song. The focus on vocal music throughout this period led quite naturally to an emphasis on melody, with a resulting simplification of the harmonic and textural elements. This gradual progress away from dissonance towards consonance, away from aggressive, dramatic, intense music, towards a more mellow style can be witnessed on the pages of his later symphonic works.
In the early 1960s the periodicals "Ruch Muzyczny" and "Muzyka" carried numerous publications which helped Górecki discover the fascinating world of music of the past. At the same time Górecki was afraid that by entering the circle of Old Polish inspirations he could be left outside the sphere of the European avant-garde, of which he wished to be a part. As a result, he conceived Three Pieces in Old Style as both insignificant stylizations and highly important, creative experiments, vital for the development of his own constructivist-sonoristic compositional style, stemming from his dodecaphonic and pointillist experience.
The source material for the Chorale and finale of Three Pieces in Old Style had been taken from an article "Studies into the Music of the Polish Renaissance" published in the quarterly "Muzyka" in 1958. The last of Three Pieces is a transcription of an anonymous 16th-century "Song on the Wedding of King Zygmunt II". In all three parts of the work, the then 'dodecaphonic' Gorecki uses strictly diatonic, modal scales, and solely 'white' notes in the outer movements. In the first part, the melodic line, maintained in the manner of a Polish folksong is given an accompaniment of an aggregate of perfect fourth, vertically placed on the Dorian scale.
The second part is an archaic countrydance in the Aeolian scale, built on G. The final part is the arrangement of four-part Renaissance song. Employing the Dorian mode, the composer initially sets the melody against the first five notes of the mode. In each case, the treatment of the musical material is truly masterful, revealing the skills of a trail-blazing constructivist rather than the neo-Classicist stylist.
